• Duke Thinking Online assesses the event positively, particularly liked the SaaS and Social Media sessions.
• Taylor Barr comments on Bob Young’s (Red Hat and Lulu.com founder) presentation.
• Online Community Strategist provides notes from the Corporate Blogging session.

Following my initial enthusiasm, I quickly became underwhelmed by the old-school atmosphere of the event. Every session, with the exception of the opening keynotes, were panel discussions, considered by many to be one of the weakest presentation formats. There was little opportunity for the “audience” to participate. The one exception was Jim Tobin using Twitter during his session to field questions. Yes, the other sessions  did take questions, but it was always just a couple of quick ones during the last 5 minutes. Not what I call engaging the audience.

Another thing that bothered me was that there was a strong theme, in the sessions I attended, toward using the internet only as a customer acquisition tool; CPC, Page views, traffic, conversion, etc. I heard almost no one talking about how online tools can also be used to keep customers and add value to the customer relationship, through things like better customer service, and communities.

And my final rant, there was no attempt (oops, my bad, there was a “networking lunch”) little opportunity for attendees to interact. Sessions were back-to-back with typically less than the scheduled 15 minutes before the next session. I would have liked to see a published attendee list, a pre-conference social space, an official conference backchannel and conference tag.

PLUS

I realize it is not like me to rant so much, but I think we have such a great opportunity to show off how this area of the country has so much to offer, and I want our local events to be excellent. And to show that I am not just sitting in the back row lobbing grenades, I would be happy to talk to the folks that put on the event and look at combining Internet Summit 2009 and BlogCarolinas next year, taking the best from both and holding a truly world class event.

So if we expand the operations layer, here is what it looks like (to me).

• Develop Offering - The creation of your actual product or service. This is inclusive of R&D and Production.
• Educate - With your offering in hand, you have to figure out how to tell potential customers what it is, in a way that they will want to consider “paying” for it.
• Create Decision Space - This is the time after you have the potential customer’s attention and before they have decided to plunk down their hard earned coin. It is also the mechanism by which you can assist them effectively gather the information they need to make their decision.
• Transaction - The (now) customer puts down the cash and you provide the value (hopefully).
• Maintain Connection - Once you have engaged the customer, how do you keep their attention?

So what is with all of this modeling?

I want to use these models to more effectively show how, and where, Relationship Technology can best be used to improve business outcomes. This is my attempt to overcome the problem I see in most pitches for using “social media” for business, there is no solid business framework upon which claims of value are made; just bold claims that “social media is good marketing” or “enterprise 2.0 will improve collaboration” without any context or explaination of the why or how.

I want to use these models to overcome that problem.

• Social Media
• Enterprise 2.0
• Web 2.0
• Social Networks
• Blogs
• etc.

None of these work well as an umbrella term. In light of that, I am going to start using

Relationship Technology

as my general term. You may like it or not, I don’t care. It works for me. So there!

I have often pondered the basics of business and, as I wrote in a previous post about Peter Drucker’s writings, many organizations have not addressed, nor do they understand, their own business basics. The other day I was thinking out loud in my trusty Moleskine notebook and came up with this:

The top two level are straight from Drucker. The top level of the diagram Ongoing Operations means that the ultimate purpose of the enterprise is be able to meet customers’ needs in the future, i.e. the company needs to be sustainable. The second level Reasonable Profit, means that organizations do not exist to maximize profit, but rather to make the right profit to ensure the company’s existence in the future. Often profit maximization in the short-term actually hurts an organization’s long-term prospects.

So with an understanding of the top of the pyramid, let’s jump to the bottom and work our way back up. At the base are the fundamentals. There are three things that must be present if any organization hopes to survive.

• Business Plan - What is the underlying concept of the organization, what is its product/service and how it is delivered?
• Qualified Employees - Does the organization poses the requisite skills to deliver the business plan?
• Efficient Operations - Can you execute the plan within budget?

Though a solid foundation layer is a necessary condition to achieve the ultimate objective of Ongoing Operations, it is not, in and of itself, a sufficient condition. So we go to the next layer, Engaged Employees. Just because you have employees that are capable of doing the job well, does not necessarily mean that they will perform well. They need to be willing to exert their discretionary effort to achieve excellent results and discretionary effort comes from engaged and passionate employees, ones that believe in the organization and what it is trying to accomplish.

When you have Engaged Employees on top of a solid foundation you get Effective Operations. That means better R&D, better Production, better Sales & Marketing, all leading to better products and services. When you do it right you create Engaged Customers, people that want to interact with you. If you listen to your customers and they are listening to you, you have the opportunity to create and deliver value for your customers, and ultimately the customer’s perception of value is what it is all about. If they receive value, and you have done everything else right, you get to receive a Reasonable Profit and live to create value again through Ongoing Operations.

Whew!

OK, assuming you buy into the model…so what?

In future posts I plan on using this model to show how social media and connected enterprise initiatives can be effectively integrated into a business, and why you would want to.

Here is the core presentation that preceded the panel discussion.

You can also find the presentations posted on Slideshare.

First off is the mea maxima culpa … I screwed up and did not record the session due to a  common technical problem known as USER ERROR.

Oh Well, next time I will know. I read somewhere recently that an expert is someone that has made every mistake possible in a narrow field of endeavor. One down, many more to go, then I can call myself a webinar expert.

I want to thank my panelists for participating and contributing their fantastic insight. If you want to find out more about them, here is the necessary info:

Lee Bryant

• Email: lee@headshift.com
• Website: www.headshift.com
• Twitter: LeeBryant

Mark Scrimshire

• Email: mark@eive.com
• Website: www.ekive.com
• Twitter: ekivemark

Michael Stallard

• Email: mstallard@epluribuspartners.com
  
• Website: www.epluribuspartners.com
• Michael has also published an online article that you may find interesting.

If you attended the webinar, I would appreciate your feedback. Thanks.

I would also like to thank Brian Russell, owner of Carrboro Creative Coworking for providing the space for setting up the “control center” for the webinar. The Internet connection at my house is sometimes a bit iffy. CCC’s synchronous T1 line was great to have.

54 years ago Drucker published The Practice of Management. It is without a doubt the most important business book ever written. It is sad how few people in business have actually read it. One passage that I find particularly compelling, highlights how far most organizations are, even today, from understanding what he was talking about over half a century ago.

It is the customer who determines what a business is. For it is the customer, and he alone, who through willing [sic] to pay for a good or for a service, converts economic resources into wealth, things into goods. What the business thinks it produces is not of first importance — especially not to the future of the business and to its success. What a customer thinks he is buying, what he considers “value” is decisive — it determines what a business is, what it produces and whether it will prosper.

The customer is the foundation of a business and keeps it in existence. He alone gives employment. And it is to supply the consumer that society entrusts wealth-producing resources to the business enterprise.

If more companies had heeded this advice, I think the adversarial relationship most people experience with their service providers would not exist today.

So can we turn the tide and look at customers more like partners? I think Drucker would have applauded using the new tools available today to build better relationships between providers of goods and services and their customers. But what exactly will that look like? … Stay tuned.

Here is the key bit of information, https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/999220840 the registration link.

The panel will be:

• Lee Bryant, Co-Founder, Headshift
• Michael Stallard, Founder, E Pluribus Partners
• Mark Scrimshire, Founder, Ekive

The topic of discussion will be about how social tools can be used within companies to improve organizational productivity.

I hope you will join, and if you know of anyone else that might find this valuable, please forward the registration link.

Enterprise 2.0 means letting users into your back office,

Listen from 5:30 to 8:20 to hear his entire argument.

Sounds cool, so how does one actually go about doing this? I wondered the same thing. This is where serendipity and social networks come into play. About the same time I went to Web2Expo, I was catching up with a former colleague from GSK, Ralph James. It just so happens that Ralph currently works with a company that does exactly what O’Reilly was talking about, creating a simple access mechanism for back office data. That company is RSSBus.

From the RSSBus whitepaper Flattening the Information Landscape:

In his iconic book, “The World Is Flat”, Thomas Friedman lists the World Wide Web as one of the ten key world flatteners making a wealth of information available to anyone and everyone no matter where they live.  He compares HTTP to the railroad track and HTML to the boxcar that carries information from everywhere to anywhere.

However, while HTML does a good job of presenting formatted pages of information to browsers, professional information providers know how difficult it is to extract the raw data from HTML for follow-up processing like filtering or merging - and this is only one of the limitations of today’s web:  there are countless databases, news groups, personal mail files, text documents, and spreadsheets lurking throughout the network that are not served via HTTP.  While most of these repositories can be accessed directly via SQL, Internet protocols or custom API’s, the inconsistency of access protocols and formats create a barrier to quick and seamless data access.

RSSBus is a suite of information access products that provide ready-to-use connectors to several dozen Internet and Enterprise information sources while hiding differences of data organization and access protocols. The RSSBus developer learns only one call mechanism, using it to access SQL databases, office documents, network protocols, message queues, email systems, news groups, blogs, financial services, web services like the ones from Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and FedEx, and dozens of other resources.

Check out their site for a more detailed description of their product and service. I, for one, think there is huge potential here for developing the next generation applications for creating customer value, the real objective of any enterprise.

When blogs first came on the scene, I don’t think anyone was able to foresee the resulting “conversation” we all now take for granted. What the first bloggers saw was, an easy way to publish, the overcoming of previously high technical barriers. The resulting conversation was emergent, not intended. If you really look at it, I think you will find that the same is true for most of the social media formats, each was initially conceived as technical solution to a previously difficult problem.

OK … so what?

If we think of the “social tool-set” in strictly social terms, we can become blinded to the value these tools can bring to other areas of information management. I refer back again to what Tim O’Reily said at Web 2.0 Expo in NYC last September, “Enterprise 2.0 is about exposing the back office.” When you think about the implication of what he was saying, there is a lot there that has nothing to do with social behavior, per se. Exposing the back office means,

• having direct access to your account information with your cell carrier;
• being able to directly schedule your own appointments to get your car serviced;
• not having to wait 30 minutes on hold to get tech support.

These are all examples of what will be the next generation enterprise applications, built on a set of tools that are inherently simple, scalable and flexible. These applications will look a lot like blogs, wikis, RSS readers, etc, but they will not necessarily be social.

The point being, that social media came into being because for the first time a set of tools existed that was able to be easily used by a broad number of people and was able to adapt fast enough to mirror real social interaction, not because the tools were inherently social.

So let’s take off the social blinders and look at the these tools as a new and better way to move information simply and easily from where it is, to where it needs to be, regardless of whether that information is social or not.

Look at any of the SNs out there today, there is a huge amount of effort spent on the development of your profile: creating it, protecting it, generating new content to make it fatter, etc. While there is very little attention paid to the development of relationships. Oh yeah…there are lots of tools for creating new connections, but once connected, there is little ability to create a rich relationship.

I am wondering if a better model might be to center the network around the relationship instead of the individual. Think of it this way, between any two entities, there is, in reality, a large amount of shared content in many formats: email, IM, tweets, phone calls, collaborative documents. Imagine if that content was aggregated in such a way that it was equally owned and shared by both ends of the relationship. Now that would be valuable.

I can see where each entity of the relationship could manage their own use of the relationship aggregate through filters and feeds, but they would still retain equal ownership of the shared content.

This approach would have great applicability for personal/individual relationships, but the real value comes into play with B2B and B2C relationships. Imagine, for example, if you and your mobile carrier shared all of the content about the relationship, in a common accessible location…billing records, support records, email transactions, support chats, etc.

Yes, I realize there MAY be some SLIGHT ownership and control issues from the perspective of those that currently “own” the data, but I think that in time, as the inherent value in this approach comes to be appreciated, that will change.

These are just some initial thoughts. If you think there is something to this, please jump in and join the conversation. I would especially be interested in hearing what Doc Searles and the VRM gang think.